Copy the Vibe, Pay the Bill: Van Leeuwen's $23.8M Trade Dress Win

There's an old bit of hallway wisdom in branding: "Steal like an artist." A federal judge in Brooklyn just added a footnote: not the packaging, though.

In July 2026, Judge Eric Komitee of the Eastern District of New York ordered keto ice cream maker Rebel Creamery to hand over roughly $23.79 million in profits and redesign its pints, after finding that Rebel intentionally copied the look of Van Leeuwen's ice cream containers. Not the name. Not the logo. The look — the pastel palette, the clean minimalist layout, the whole "expensive-scoop-shop-in-a-freezer-aisle" impression Van Leeuwen spent years building.

If you've ever assumed that trademark law only protects a brand name, not so. And if you're the one greenlighting a "make it look like the market leader" packaging brief, please don’t.

What actually got protected here: trade dress

The thing Rebel copied is called trade dress. It is the overall visual appearance and feel of a product or its packaging. Color combinations, shapes, fonts, layout, texture, the arrangement of it all. It's a cousin of the trademark you already know, and it lives in the same statute (the Lanham Act).

To win a trade dress claim over packaging, a plaintiff generally has to show three things: the design is distinctive (or has acquired distinctiveness in consumers' minds), it's non-functional (you can't lock up a design feature that exists for a practical reason rather than a brand-identity one), and the competitor's version is likely to confuse ordinary shoppers grabbing a pint on autopilot.

Van Leeuwen cleared all three. The court found the pint design distinctive, protectable, and, importantly, that Rebel didn't stumble into a similar look. It aimed for it. Intent is rocket fuel in these cases, and the record apparently had plenty.

The part every business owner should read twice: the damages

The $23.8 million wasn't Van Leeuwen's lost sales. It wasn't a number pulled from Van Leeuwen's own P&L at all. It was disgorgement of Rebel's profits — the money Rebel made selling the infringing pints, clawed back and handed to the plaintiff.

That's a distinct and brutal remedy in trademark and unfair competition suits, and it changes the whole risk calculus. In a lot of disputes, the defendant quietly bets: "Even if we lose, what did the plaintiff really lose? Prove your lost sales." Disgorgement flips the table. The question becomes, "How much did you make while wearing our clothes?" A copycat that sells like gangbusters doesn't reduce its exposure by succeeding — it increases it. The better the knockoff sells, the bigger the check.

Trademark plaintiffs have a menu of monetary remedies to reach for: their own actual damages, the defendant's profits, and in exceptional cases enhanced damages and attorneys' fees. Disgorgement is often the headline number precisely because it doesn't require the plaintiff to reconstruct sales it can't cleanly trace — it requires the infringer to account for revenue and then prove which costs and profits weren't attributable to the stolen design. That burden-shift is where defendants bleed.

A procedural wrinkle worth its own paragraph

One more thing litigators will enjoy. Earlier in the case, Van Leeuwen declined to produce a damages computation in discovery and effectively let its legal damages claims go — which cost it a jury and sent the whole thing to a bench trial on the equitable profits remedy. It's a reminder that the type of money you're chasing (legal damages vs. equitable disgorgement) drives who decides the case and how you have to tee it up. Strategy in these suits starts on day one, not at closing argument.

The actual lesson: brands are the tip of the iceberg

Most companies guard the obvious stuff — the name, the logo, the tagline — and treat packaging as a design decision rather than a legal asset. Van Leeuwen is a $23.8 million argument for treating your packaging like the intellectual property it is.

A few things worth doing before your next product hits a shelf:

If you own a distinctive look: document it. Keep dated design files, marketing spend, press, and anything showing consumers associate the look with you. Consider federal registration of your trade dress. That paper trail is what turns "we have a vibe" into "we have a protectable, distinctive, non-functional trade dress."

If you're designing new packaging: the competitive-analysis mood board is fine; the "make ours read as basically theirs" brief is not. Clear your packaging the way you'd clear a name. Internal emails cheering how close you got to the market leader are the single most expensive documents your marketing team can create.

Either way: the freezer aisle, the shelf, the app icon, the unboxing — that's all brand real estate, and courts will protect it and put a price on stealing it.

Steal like an artist if you must. Just paint your own pint.

This post is general information about trademark and unfair competition law, not legal advice, and it doesn't create an attorney-client relationship. If a competitor is riding your packaging — or someone's accusing you of riding theirs — talk to counsel about your specific facts. Better yet, talk to me: Jonathan L.A. Phillips, jphillips@bhslaw.com